DIGITAL IMAGING MAKES HOLIDAYS A SNAP

Market Wire, 20050229

Make this season "jolly" with the help of digital imaging. Create picture-perfect letters to Santa, e-mail holiday greetings and personalize last-minute imaging gifts with digital products, like the Sony Digital Mavica(r) or the Cyber-shot(r) digital cameras.

This holiday season more and more people are looking to the Internet for gift giving, and that's where the role of digital cameras comes into play.

E-Mail Holiday Greetings

Tired of writing out all of those holiday cards? Can never make it to the post office for stamps? With digital imaging and electronic greetings, the days of stamp licking and late cards may be a thing of the past.

Just snap an image of the family in their holiday best with a digital camera and upload it onto your PC. With a few clicks of the mouse, e-mail an electronic image to family and friends or create a special holiday message with the help of one of the many personalized e-mail greeting card sites currently available on the Internet.

For example, Sony's ImageStudio, located at sony.com/studio provides an on-line gallery of personal photos for any one to use as electronic postcards. In a few easy steps, an electronic holiday image can be posted and e-mailed as a quick and personal holiday postcard.

Digital Wish Lists For Santa and Friends

Tech-savvy kids of all ages can make sure their holiday dreams come true by creating an electronic photo wish list that can be e-mailed to Santa Claus or to the relative that always picks out the wrong gift. By snapping a digital image of their favorite toy and downloading it to e-mail, there will be no doubt as to the right toy to give on Christmas morning. Once the digital wish list is complete, e-mail it to Santa through sites like northpole4kids.com or santaclaus.com.

Personalized Imaging Gift Ideas

Creating the perfect imaging gift can be done in a few minutes on-line with the help of Sony's ImageStationSM on PhotoNet(r), located at imagestation.sony.com. ImageStation is a "virtual photo album" on the Internet, which allows you to view, store and share digital images on-line. You can post digital images to share with friends and family, order photo prints, archive images to a family album or add an image to a variety of items, such as T-shirts or coffee mugs. For example, coffee mugs with your baby's picture can be created for only $13.95 and shipped in about a week

Mini Movies By E-Mail

Sony Digital Mavica and Cyber-shot cameras also shoot mini-movies that are ideal for sharing holiday greetings via e-mail. Movie Mode can capture 60-second movies onto a floppy disk or Memory Stick(r), which can then be sent by e-mail.

Imagine sharing the first snowfall of the season or capturing the excitement of Christmas morning and e-mailing it to family and friends far away. With the Mavica's whole disk copy feature, copy a holiday mini movie right inside the camera and give a copy to guests as party favors. Festive moments of the holidays can be saved, remembered and revisited for years to come.

Seasonal Screensavers For Home and Office

Any digitally captured image can be loaded onto a PC and turned into a screensaver. A number of Web sites provide easy and quick ways to transform personal digitally captured images into a screensaver. Each screensaver can be customized with personalized options like sounds, music and animation.

Instant Holiday Postcards

Sony's photo quality printers make it easy to instantly print high-quality images. For example, pictures of holiday parties can be printed for guests during the festivities. Personalized seasonal postcards and photo calendars for the New Year can be printed and mailed out to share a favorite photo for the holidays and the upcoming year.

Holiday Slide Shows

Digital slideshows can also be displayed without a PC on Sony's CyberFrame(tm) display (model PHD-A55). The CyberFrame viewer, which brings photographic memories to life in a way that is not possible with traditional prints, is the perfect holiday gift for the person who has everything.

It enables consumers to have a "cyber holiday slide show" at home or work on a digital desktop 5 1/2" display. Mini MPEG movies or JPEG digital shots can play back on the CyberFrame display in slide show mode changing every few seconds, every 15 minutes, or once a day. The CyberFrame viewer is available now for about $900.

On-line Memories for the New Year

Archiving and sharing digital images is becoming more convenient with such sites as Sony's ImageStation. Families around the world can share photos and either upload a digital image, send in undeveloped film or old family pictures to be scanned and posted to the Web. By keeping archived family albums on the Web, the loss of pictures to time or the elements becomes a thing of the past.

Sony and Digital Imaging

Sony's cameras, printers and peripherals all offer consumers the tools to make digital imaging a part of their lives.

Sony's Digital Mavica cameras offer easy-to-use features for photographers of all ages. Images taken with the Digital Mavica camera are instantly saved on a standard 3.5" floppy disk that slips right inside the camera. Sony's full Digital Mavica line includes the MVC-FD73, MVC-FD83, MVC-FD88 and MVC-FD91, which are available now for about $500, $700, $900 and $1,000, respectively.